Jersey Girl

Little-known fact: I was born in New Jersey.

Other little-known fact: New Jersey is gorgeous.

I ended up at Jackie & Michael’s house in Whitehouse Station because I had met Jackie in late August at Harriet’s place, when I was there for the Girls’ Weekend. We had figured out pretty quickly that she was living really close to my roots, and so before she flew back to New Jersey and I continued my trek up to Halifax, she had said that when I made it to her part of the country, I had to come visit her and her husband, because the truth was, while I was from there, I had never really seen it. Three months after I was born, my dad had gotten transferred to Jacksonsville, Fla., and yes, I did go back when I was 15; my mom took my sister and my sister’s boyfriend and me for a short visit one summer but I was just starting to get acne at the time, and the world revolved more or less completely around me, so that I might as well have still been a swaddled baby, because at any rate, I again formed no real recollection of the place.

This time, however, I was ready to see it all from a more adult perspective.

Almost as soon as I arrived at Jackie & Michael’s house on a Saturday afternoon, she asked if I wanted to go to Clinton, the tiny town where my parents and older sister lived when they had me. I did want to go there and so we put Rennie in the car and drove first to the hospital where I was born, and then we went and took pictures in front of the old place that my parents bought when my mom was my age and my dad was four years older.

And as we were later walking through the quaint downtown streets, I saw a basket of Clinton T-shirts and realized I had better buy one, because while I am not usually one for a boxy piece of clothing that costs $16 to simply state that I have been somewhere, it seemed like that was a good time to make an exception. When I went inside to pay for it, I told the woman behind the counter that I had been born there and that I was just passing through, so we talked about Clinton a little and she said that because of AT&T, which is who my dad had been working for, there were a lot of people who came and went from there and that some got transferred back a second time, but also that a lot of people just came back to check on it. One gal came through and said that she had been gone for something like 16 years but that she came back to check on this woman, who had had her store for 35 years, and she said to this woman: “Coming over the bridge, it still looks exactly the same.”

I ended up staying a second night at Jackie & Michael’s. And a third night. And a fourth night. And finally, a fifth night. I went well past my three-night maximum and it was because I was having a hard time getting in touch with my next stop in the Camden area, and while normally I would have just moved on and considered it a miss, that friend had been extremely enthusiastic about seeing me, so I was trying to buy some time for it to still work out, before I moved on for good. And I felt bad that I was at one stop for so long, especially because I did not know my hosts that well when I got there, but each time I talked about moving to a campsite, they would tell me that such a thing was not necessary, and so I stayed. And we got to know each other better, each day a little more. I helped Michael back up and organize their family photos on the computer, and I made them dinner one night, and we walked Rennie in the mornings, and read The New York Times over coffee, and Jackie told me about her career girl days, before she and Michael both retired and adjusted to their new roles in life and started traveling all but four months out of the year, visiting family in California and Hawaii, and their house in Mexico, and other far-away places in the world.

And everyone loved Rennie. And Rennie loved everyone. He was so comfortable in our little upstairs room with two twin beds, between Jackie’s childhood dollhouse and her mother’s antique hat collection. And I got to meet two of their daughters, one of whom was visiting from the Los Angeles area and wanted to drive around to see the horse country with Jackie and me. So we got in the car one afternoon and drove through all these little communities that dot the countryside off of I-78, hopping out every so often to take pictures, once even staging a photo shoot in front of some hay bales, before finally stopping for coffee and cake at a small general store. And I got to go with them to a play adaptation of the book Three Cups of Tea, an inspiring story about doing something that is greater than yourself and doing it just because you believe in it, and carrying on with it, despite opposition and obstacles. And I also got to see my parents’ old neighbor, Sally, who did not hesitate to say Yes when I called her one morning and asked if she had any time that day to meet me. An hour and half later, we were having lunch and catching up on news about each other’s families, and neither of us really knew the other one at all but it didn’t matter, because our pasts had been so firmly entwined at one point: my sister used to play with her three kids to the point that it was her second home, and my parents hung out with Sally and her late husband, and growing up down in Florida and then Georgia, I would hear about all of them and see the orange-tinted, 70s-era photos and be intrigued about that life before me.

The whole thing felt pretty right. I could have gotten stranded anywhere on my trip. But of all the places for it to happen, it was extraordinarily serendipitous for it to happen where it did, considering not just that I was with kind, gracious people who made me feel at home, but also that I was only 10 miles from where I was born 30 years ago. And it took me forever to write this post, which was partly because I have had a visitor for the past week who was kind of distracting me, and partly because I then entered a Black Hole of Random Internet Access for about two days, and partly because I think I wanted it to be extraordinarily profound. After all, it was a homecoming. But I think that sometimes the most momentous occasions are the hardest ones to write about, because they can also be the most subtle. I did not feel like anything was much different inside of me when I finally left Whitehouse Station; I just felt perhaps a little bit more grounded — like a sea turtle who had finally found her way back to the beach where she hatched.